Margot Cohen, Jakarta – The rupiah has plunged and urban unemployment is up. Hard times for Indonesia – and hard times call for courage, not caution. That was the message hammered home on December 28, when an unprecedented gathering of Muslim leaders and intellectuals rejected the prospect of a seventh term for 76-year-old President Suharto.
Bold demands for political change were greeted with applause and cries of "God is Great!" from nearly 1,000 people packing the ballroom of a Jakarta hotel. The event drew well-known figures from mainstream Muslim organizations, as well as some individuals from the Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals. The association, commonly known by its Indonesian acronym ICMI, was established in 1990 under the patronage of Research and Technology Minister B.J. Habibie.
The meeting was a clear sign that Suharto is losing his grip on the constituency of "modernist" urban Muslims who served as an important new source of support for him in the early 1990s. These urban Muslims could, in turn, swell the ranks of Indonesia's struggling pro-democracy forces, analysts say. Although the ruling Golkar party has assiduously wooed both urban and rural Muslims, the silent compliance of both groups can no longer be taken for granted in the wake of the economic crisis.
"Are we going to wait for a series of even bigger disasters to convince us that the status quo should no longer be preserved?" charged Amien Rais, chairman of Muhammadiyah, which counts 25 million members nationwide. He accused the Suharto government of breeding "corruption, collusion, nepotism, greed and moral degeneration" and denounced "those who act solely in the interests of themselves and their families" – a clear allusion to Suharto's children and their business empires.
The gathering was ostensibly organized by the Muslim weekly magazine Ummat to present 53-year-old Rais with its "Man of the Year" award. Rais's popularity soared after he was pressured to resign from the ICMI leadership due to his outspoken criticism of the large Freeport mine in Irian Jaya and the now-bust Busang gold rush. Recently, Rais has even offered himself as a candidate for president – an idea loudly endorsed by the gathering.
More broadly, the award ceremony seemed calculated to raise the volume of Muslim protest and forge new solidarity between rival Muslim groups. "We don't want to count ourselves among the generation of dwarves who rely on language that is monotone, uniform and utterly lacking in alternatives," declared Ummat's assistant editor, M. Syafi'i Anwar. Notably absent from the meeting was Abdurrahman Wahid, the influential chairman of the 35-million-member Nahdlatul Ulama. However, Wahid later said in an interview that he supports Rais's efforts. "In my opinion, he has a vital role to play in the political education of our people," Wahid said. "I really wish that the candidacy would develop into a big snowball that would ruin anyone else's candidacy."
Such enthusiasm may seem surprising to those who recall Wahid's past quarrels with Rais. While Wahid has made efforts to reach out to non-Muslims, Rais is remembered for his objections to the "over-representation" of Christians in government. But Rais's speech at the meeting stressed the importance of national unity, and was bolstered by the endorsement of Catholic theologian Franz Magnis-Suseno.
The hard part will be translating this nascent solidarity into a concrete vision for the future. Concludes political scientist Hikam Muhammad A.S.: "Unless you have a common platform, the so-called turning point will not happen."